Planning Wind Farms for the Next 30 Years – with Qlik Data+
- Jul 13
- 2 min read
How do you plan an investment that runs for decades without re-entering values year after year? That's exactly the question our team recently answered in a customer project: a wind farm needed to be planned for the next 30 years – with as little manual effort as possible. In our latest video, we show how this works with Qlik and Data+.
The challenge: long-term planning across many periods
Whether it's a wind farm, a new product, or a cost center – as soon as a plan spans many years or periods, manually re-entering the same or similar values quickly becomes tedious. This is exactly where Data+ comes in: once values have been planned for one year, they can be copied across as many future periods as needed with just a few clicks.
The workflow at a glance
In the video, we walk through the full process using a concrete example – a new offshore wind farm:
1. Create a new planning scenario First, a new project is created – in this case, "Wind Farm Number 8." The start year and duration (here: 30 years) are defined right away. The same principle applies to other scenarios, such as a new product or a new cost center.
2. Capture the location with the Location Mapper A built-in Location Mapper lets you select the wind farm's location directly on a map – for example, an offshore site in the North Sea. Latitude and longitude are captured automatically, and the new wind farm immediately appears on the overall map alongside all existing sites.
3. Actuals and planning in the same sheet For the current year, the actuals already available – for example, through July – can be combined directly with the remaining plan periods for that year. Sums and other calculations can also be added easily with Data+. Distribution logic, as shown in one of our earlier videos, can be incorporated here just as easily.
4. Rolling values forward across 30 years automatically Instead of manually entering plan values for each of the 30 years, Data+ Flow takes over this step automatically: the values entered for one year are copied to all subsequent years with a single click – in this case, from 2027 all the way through 2056. Once the process is complete, the values are immediately available across all affected years.
What use cases does this fit?
The example shown is a wind farm, but the same principle applies to virtually any planning scenario with recurring values across many periods:
Liquidity planning
Forecasts for new products that aren't yet reflected in your ERP system
FTE planning
Cost center planning
Capacity planning in production
This combines the flexibility you know from Excel with the performance of the Qlik analytics engine – without the manual effort that long-term planning in Excel typically involves.
Try it yourself
The app shown is available on our demo tenant. If you'd like to see how this approach could work for your own planning scenario, feel free to reach out – we're happy to show you how we can build it together.